Bohemians, Palestine and football’s deafening silence
Photo: Liam Miller
Dalymount Park is an unassuming football ground. It is buried by its surroundings, barely visible from the road. Floodlights poke out above the terraced houses of Phibsborough, the semi-gentrified but traditionally working class northside neighbourhood of Dublin in which it resides. An early first-time visitor, with no crowd to follow, could well find themselves doing several laps before finding the correct gap in the row of houses that leads to the alleyway of turnstiles. It is a humble setting, but one that has witnessed enough history to fill a thousand books.
It was the epicentre of Irish football for almost a century, staging countless FAI Cup finals, European matches and hosting the national team for home games until 1990. Bob Marley played his final ever outdoor concert at Dalymount. Its history is not only synonymous with Irish football, but Irish culture.
And much of that history belongs to Bohemians FC, who have called it home for over 100 years. Bohs, as they’re more endearingly called, are an outlier football club. 100% fan-owned, they’re known worldwide for their passionately anti-racist, anti-discriminatory identity.
Never was that identity more proudly visible than on that late-Spring evening back in May, as Dalymount Park played host to yet another occasion fit for the history books. For the first time ever, a Palestinian national team would play a football match on European soil.
“Sport has enormous power to be a force for good across the world”, wrote Bohs President, Matt Devaney in the matchday programme. “As an entirely fan-owned football club, Bohemians pride ourselves on undertaking initiatives that harness that power.”
In the long-standing tradition of solidarity between the Irish and Palestinian people, this friendly match, between Bohemians and the Palestine women’s national team, will forever be held up as a defining moment.
Not only did the game fall on the 76th anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe) – a day of pained significance for Palestinians everywhere – this was an act of solidarity at a time when it was most needed.
Life under siege
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza since October 7th has been unrelenting; at the time of writing, over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, a figure that could be as high as 186,000, according to medical journal The Lancet. As much as 90% of Gaza’s internal population has been displaced, and many thousands more have been seriously injured and maimed.
Palestinians living in Gaza are, according to Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur to the United Nations, suffering “mass ethnic cleansing under the fog of war.” The United Nations Human Rights Council has described Israel’s actions, including its blockade of the Gaza strip, as a clear destruction of the infrastructure for basic survival which, according to Human Rights Watch, amounts to the use of starvation as a method of warfare – a crime against humanity.
Each of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and the International Criminal Court have accused Israel of committing international war crimes in Gaza. The most serious of these, according to Albanese and the UNHRC, amounts to genocide.
This years’ extreme escalation of violence follows a decades-long occupation and enforcement of apartheid in Palestinian territory, which the International Court of Justice – the world’s highest legal authority – recently ruled to be in breach of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention.
It is the world’s most critical humanitarian situation. The US, UK and other powerful nations have not only failed to institute a ceasefire, but appear hellbent on facilitating further destruction by supplying Israel with arms. As they abrogate their duty to protect human rights and stop the killing, so too does the world of sport.
“Back home, the stadiums we use are in what I would call ‘hotspots’, where it is not safe to be. Last season, when we were playing a game in Ramallah, the IDF gas-bombed all around the pitch. We couldn’t breathe, we had to stop playing.”
Bisan Abuaita, speaking in the matchday programme. Photo: Liam Miller
There have been innumerable tragedies since the violence restarted, enough to neuter even the most evangelical sports-and-politics-don’t-mix dogma.
At the end of July, the Palestinian National Olympic Committee estimated that around 400 athletes had been killed in recent attacks, as well as decrying the destruction of its sporting infrastructure.
Estimates place the number of footballers to have been murdered in Gaza between 90-100. The most famous of these, Muhammad Barakat – known affectionately as ‘The Legend of Khan Younis’ due to his long-standing association with Khan Younis Youth Club, was killed when an Israeli airstrike hit his family home in March.
The Head Coach of the Palestinian Olympic football team, Hani Al-Masdar, was also murdered by an Israeli airstrike in January.
Many will recall the video – one of the most sickening to have surfaced since Israel stepped up its bombardment of Gaza – of an airstrike hitting a dozen-or-so children playing football at a school-turned-shelter in Khan Younis back at the start of July. A total of 31 Palestinians, including eight children, were killed in that one attack.
Just three weeks later, another airstrike in the Golan Heights, an Israeli-occupied territory that straddles the Syrian border, killed 12 children between the ages of 10 and 16. The target was a football pitch.
And while there are scarcely any areas in Gaza left untouched by Israeli aggression, in some cases sport has even been a vehicle for violence. In December it was reported that one of Gaza’s oldest and largest football stadiums, Yarmouk Stadium, had been used by the IDF as a makeshift “interrogation and torture camp.” Eyewitness accounts said numerous atrocities were carried out, including threats, beatings and murder.
Israeli government rhetoric backhandedly swats away these tragedies as accidents, against almost no scrutiny. What ground-level accountability does remain comes at a tremendous cost to those pursuing it; 116 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October.
The football world, when confronted by these atrocities, remains similarly silent.
The Palestinian FA submitted a proposal to suspend Israel from FIFA back in May, a proposal which so far has fallen on deaf ears. While football’s governing body ordered an urgent legal evaluation, it has delayed a decision, now expected in October, on two separate occasions.
Commenting on the delay, research and advocacy nonprofit FairSquare, who specialise in human rights abuses in the world of sport, said:
“There is a vast body of evidence to suggest that the only thing that could possibly stop FIFA from suspending or expelling the Israel Football Association is a political decision from its senior leadership not to enforce its statutes.”
It also criticised the inaction of UEFA on this issue. “UEFA acted swiftly and decisively in the case of Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine,” said FairSquare co-director Nicholas McGeehan. “But it appears to have no qualms about credible and ongoing allegations of genocide as a result of Israel’s demonstrably illegal and disproportionate actions in Gaza.”
The case of Roman Abramovich stands out as a clear illustration of this dichotomy. In 2020, a series of leaked documents revealed that the former Chelsea owner donated more than $100M to Elad, a far-right Israeli organisation accused of displacing Palestinian families in Jerusalem. His donations, which spanned over a decade between 2005 and 2018, were disguised in a network of shell companies located in the British Virgin Islands. He was granted Israeli citizenship in 2018. It took action from the British government in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to intervene in his ownership of one of the country’s largest clubs. His previous activities, it must be concluded, were deemed tolerable.
The absence of a decision from FIFA has created a vacuum, which has proliferated unrest and bolstered those intent on descending into abuse and misinformation across the board. Responses from clubs, as a result, have been muddled at best.
As reports of the deteriorating situation emerged, shows of support for Palestine intensified on the terraces of some clubs, most notably Celtic’s Green Brigade and Liverpool’s Kop End. In both cases supporters were removed from the stadiums and in the case of the former – perhaps the most fervent ally of Palestinian rights in UK sport – fans were even banned from entry.
Elsewhere, Anwar El Ghazi recently won a landmark case against his former club Mainz, who terminated his contract after the player shared a series of pro-Palestinian posts on his social media. That termination, according to a German labour court, was wrongful. The club reportedly owed him close to £1.4M in salary and bonuses, which has since been paid out.
Standing tall in victory
“We usually have national team training in one of two cities,” explains Bisan Abuaita in an interview in the matchday programme at Dalymount. “To get to Bethlehem, we have to cross through one major checkpoint. It can take hours, or it might have been open all day, but they decide to close it just before we arrive. In Jericho, there are two checkpoints. It’s very hard for us to meet up.”
Crossing checkpoints under military occupation to attend training. In all its founding documents and mission statements, this is not the game that FIFA is supposed to preserve. But the reality is simple: this is not only the life of a Palestinian footballer, but a Palestinian citizen.
To rapturous applause, both teams linked arm-in-arm and ran towards the Jodi Stand on that famous evening in Dublin. That Bohs lost 2-1 was entirely inconsequential; that Palestine won was everything. After an own goal drew the visitors level, a late winner from Viktoria Berlin teenager Nour Youssef – a rising star in German women’s football – created irrevocable history. As a purple sunset fell on Dalymount, the post-match scenes were emotional and joyous, wrapped in a mixture of ecstasy and relief.
Photo: Liam Miller
To train, go through a pre-match ritual, interact with fans, celebrate a goal – they’re all things most footballers, at any level, can take for granted. Affording the women playing in that friendly the basic dignity of a matchday process in peace and security is, perhaps, the biggest victory of all.
With clarity of purpose and courage of their convictions, Bohemians pulled off a seismic act of solidarity. An impassioned crowd of over 4,200 fans, as well as countless donations and non-attendance tickets, raised almost €100,000 – as well as funding the three-day visit for every player and backroom staff member – which was split between humanitarian partners Palestine Sport for Life, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and Aclaí Palestine. Irish folk legend Mary Black sang at half-time, Annie Mac and Toddla T performed a post-game DJ set in the club’s famous Mono Bar, while the arrival of Michael Higgins, President of Ireland, received one the largest cheers of the evening.
This was not just an event for a cherished Dublin institution, it was an event for all of Ireland.
The Dalymount Park we know and love today won’t be here for long. By 2027, its aged corners will have been demolished and rebuilt, and Bohs will step into a new era.
The first goal scored by a Palestine National team on European soil is an unerasable moment, at a time where so much Palestinian identity is at risk of erasure. That a moment of such magnitude would also be the final international goal witnessed by those famous stands, is a quirk of synchronicity that perhaps only football, at its very best, seems capable of.
Just two weeks later, Ireland, Spain and Norway officially recognised the State of Palestine — a crucial diplomatic step in securing peace. More progress was made in those two weeks to further Palestinian justice than in the previous six months, and a simple game of football sat at the heart of it. For those who revere the game’s power, we cannot lose sight of that.
